US 7,454,173 B2Granted

Load control in shared medium many-to-one communication systems

AssigneeTelefonaktiebolaget L M Ericsson (publ)

InventorsNiclas Wiberg, Eva Englund, Ke Wang Helmersson, Janne Peisa, Johan Torsner, Christer Edholm, Stefan Parkvall, Maria Edvardsson, Maria Samuelsson

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Abstract

A load control method is described herein that enables a base station to broadcast three downlink signals including a busy indicator, a maximum resource indicator and a minimum resource indicator to a mobile terminal. In response to receiving the downlink signals, the mobile terminal limits the utilization of a resource (e.g., bit rate, transmission power, power offset) it uses to transmit data to the base station. The mobile terminal may also send an uplink signal including a resource request to the base station. The base station can use the resource request to change the downlink signals if needed. It is with the proper use of these uplink/downlink signals that the behavior of the base station can be automatically optimized to the load situation.

A method for limiting the utilization of a resource used by a mobile terminal to transmit data to a base station in order to optimize and control a load at the base station, said method comprising the steps of:

receiving a plurality of downlink signals at said mobile terminal that were transmitted from said base station;
processing the downlink signals to establish a limitation on the use of a resource that is associated with data which is subsequently transmitted from said mobile terminal to said base station;
wherein said resource is a bit rate, transmission power or a power offset where said power offset is a function of power that is distributed between a data channel and a control channel;
wherein said downlink signals include:
a busy indicator;
and,
a maximum resource indicator;
and,
wherein said step of processing the downlink signals to establish the limitation on the use of the resource that is associated with the data which is subsequently transmitted by said mobile terminal to said base station is performed in the following manner:
if said busy indicator is set to busy then:
said mobile terminal is not allowed to begin transmission of the data;
or,
said mobile terminal if it is already transmitting data is allowed to continue transmission of the data at its current or lower bit rate, power, or power offset though still obeying a limitation in the maximum resource indicator;
otherwise,
if said busy indicator is not set to busy then:
said mobile terminal is allowed to begin transmission of the data but if said processor had been waiting to transmit data because the busy indicator was previously set to busy then said processor needs to follow a ramping procedure to ramp-up a bit rate, power, or power offset of the transmitted data;
or,
said mobile terminal if it was transmitting data and wanted to increase a bit rate, power, or power offset of the transmitted data while said busy indicator was set to busy can now in accordance with the ramping procedure increase the bit rate, power, or power offset of the transmitted data.

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Abstract

Claims7